In this episode of Beyond Science, Dr. L explores one of the most intimate and controversial forms of alleged post-mortem communication: automatic writing.

A grieving mother, identified as Jennifer, shares a deeply personal experience she has kept largely private: a letter she believes was written by her son two years after his death, transcribed by a medium during a session of psychography. The letter contains no grand revelations, no cosmic secrets—only tenderness, memory, forgiveness, and reassurance. And yet, its impact on her life has been profound.

Jennifer’s testimony opens a rigorous inquiry into the history and psychology of automatic writing, a practice documented across cultures and centuries and once taken seriously by leading scientists and intellectuals. From 19th-century séances to contemporary peer-reviewed studies conducted under controlled conditions, the episode examines how such phenomena can be investigated without surrendering either to credulity or to ridicule.

As Dr. L navigates competing explanations, fraud, suggestion, unconscious ideomotor processes, grief-driven meaning-making, the episode also confronts a quieter but equally unsettling question: when an experience brings measurable relief, emotional healing, and a restored sense of meaning, does its ultimate explanation matter?

When the Dead Write Back is not an argument for belief in communication with the dead. It is an exploration of grief, consciousness, and the ethical limits of scientific skepticism where denying experience may cause as much harm as accepting it too easily.

This episode asks whether science can study such experiences seriously without dismissing the people who live through them and what is lost when it refuses to try.

In the inaugural episode of Beyond Science, Dr. L sits down with Philip, a respected scientist and university professor who carries a lifelong secret: since adolescence, he has perceived the presence of a woman no one else can see. He does not seek belief, sympathy, or explanation, only understanding.

This episode explores what happens when personal experience collides with scientific skepticism. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, history, and anthropology, we examine why encounters with the “unusual” were once taken seriously by leading scientists and why they later vanished from mainstream research. We ask uncomfortable questions:

What counts as evidence?

When does perception become pathology?

And what is the cost of silence when science refuses to listen?

Blending intimate testimony with rigorous inquiry, this episode challenges the boundary between the real and the unreal, and asks whether science loses something vital when it refuses to look.

Doubt is not the enemy here. It is the method.

Welcome to Beyond Science.

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You can find all references used in this episode on our website

https://www.beyondscience.com

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The opening audio is from the film The Sixth Sense (1999), directed by M. Night Shyamalan.